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Hiring Without Whiteboards

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Re: Hiring Without Whiteboards

#171

Post by jmchuster »

PragmaticPulp wrote: post #159
marcinzm wrote: post #46

The advantage of leetcode is that you study once and then it applies for every job you interview for. Like democracy it's a horrible system except for all the others. Take home project? There goes 4-12 hours per company that gives you one and sometimes more. Companies have no incentive to cut it down or not give it to even marginal candidates so you'll get a lot more of them than full in-person interviews. Pair progr…

In the past we had some candidates complain about take-home problems. The primary complaint was that candidates weren't interested in dedicating 4-5 hours of their own time unless they felt that someone from the company was putting in an equal amount of their own time. Some candidates also had suspicions that we were trying to use them for free labor (Not true, we used the same toy problem for every candidate). One c…

So instead of doing a 4-hour on-site interview, you make a hiring decision based on a 4-hour take-home problem?

Re: Hiring Without Whiteboards

#172

Post by fazkan »

A. this is a good list. B. Lets not forget that whiteboarding is not all evil. If used correctly, it can filter out a lot of people that don't have good CS fundamentals. By fundamentals, I don't mean inverting a binary tree. At the end of the day, as a technical manager, the goal is to hire smart+hard working people.

Re: Hiring Without Whiteboards

#173

Post by justinclift »

PragmaticPulp wrote: post #159
marcinzm wrote: post #46

The advantage of leetcode is that you study once and then it applies for every job you interview for. Like democracy it's a horrible system except for all the others. Take home project? There goes 4-12 hours per company that gives you one and sometimes more. Companies have no incentive to cut it down or not give it to even marginal candidates so you'll get a lot more of them than full in-person interviews. Pair progr…

In the past we had some candidates complain about take-home problems. The primary complaint was that candidates weren't interested in dedicating 4-5 hours of their own time unless they felt that someone from the company was putting in an equal amount of their own time. Some candidates also had suspicions that we were trying to use them for free labor (Not true, we used the same toy problem for every candidate). One c…

> One candidate even thought they should be able to bill us for their time spent applying ...

Are you meaning they wanted your company to pay for the time used to solve the take-home problem?

If so, isn't it normally done that way in order to prevent companies potentially exploiting free labour?

Re: Hiring Without Whiteboards

#174

Post by jmchuster »

kanobo wrote: post #4

If I were a large company with money I would simply ask all qualified applicants if they would be willing to work on a small part of a real project as a contractor with the possibility of getting hired. Applicants get paid for their time, productivity is achieved, jobs might be offered, everybody is happy.

That effectively eliminates from the pool any one who currently has a job?

Re: Hiring Without Whiteboards

#175

Post by aclatuts »

cletus wrote: post #68

Oh God, here we go again. Coding on a whiteboard in an interview is not "broken". What is "broken" however is making the problem the candidate needs to solve "hard". I can't stress this enough: a whiteboard coding test is nothing more than a negative filter . It's to filter out people who can't turn a simple idea into code as these people exist. This is why FizzBuzz was such a simple problem. But interviewers fall in…

This is also a fair point. I usually do bad on white board coding. But I really enjoyed a white board interview that only tested my knowledge of javascript. The problem didn't require 3 paragraphs of explanation and examples. The interview involved a series of 1-2 sentence requirements that built on top of each other.

Re: Hiring Without Whiteboards

#176

Post by victor9000 »

11thEarlOfMar wrote: post #169

We use a 3 step process, sans whiteboard: 1. First interview, the candidate interviews us. What market we serve, what our development processes are, what our technology stack is. If they express interest by being prepared and asking good questions, we send them home with 2. a programming task. Choose 1 of 5 tasks. The tasks are not abstract problems or puzzles, but come out of the designs we've implemented. We ask fo…

This sounds like a pretty reasonable process, are you guys hiring?

Re: Hiring Without Whiteboards

#177

Post by 11thEarlOfMar »

victor9000 wrote: post #176
11thEarlOfMar wrote: post #169

We use a 3 step process, sans whiteboard: 1. First interview, the candidate interviews us. What market we serve, what our development processes are, what our technology stack is. If they express interest by being prepared and asking good questions, we send them home with 2. a programming task. Choose 1 of 5 tasks. The tasks are not abstract problems or puzzles, but come out of the designs we've implemented. We ask fo…

This sounds like a pretty reasonable process, are you guys hiring?

Digital Dynamics, a small company in Scotts Valley, Ca. We make specialty industrial control computers.

Re: Hiring Without Whiteboards

#178

Post by koreth1 »

underwater wrote: post #153
leonidasv wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hate take-home projects more than I hate whiteboard interviews. I think the best approach would be giving the candidate a broken app and have they debug it live or in a take-home debug-and-fix or debug-and-improve exercise. Could also have some refactor assignment. Has any company tried something like this before?

I don't understand how take home interviews are being held up as a better solution. They have two major flaws: They lower the cost for the company to zero. So they can widen their pool, and take a chance on more candidates, with no extra cost incurred for them. If you take this to the extreme – every company asking every candidate to complete a take home – then the result is far worse for candidates. There is no feed…

My company does take-home interviews (or rather, we give candidates the option to do them; nearly all candidates choose take-home instead of a live coding session) and I don't think I agree with the "lowers the cost to zero" point. First of all, they are never the starting point; we only give a take-home problem to a candidate after we've had an initial discussion with them.

When we get a take-home submission, we essentially run it through our code review process, and as one of the engineers who does reviews, it usually takes me nearly as long to thoroughly examine a homework solution and write up my feedback for internal discussion as it would to do an in-person interview.

Being able to review a candidate's code on my own schedule rather than being yanked from the middle of some knotty problem to go do an interview at a fixed time is a big quality-of-life win for me. But the rate limit isn't much different than it would be with regular interviews.

All that said, it's totally possible our process is super atypical.

Re: Hiring Without Whiteboards

#179

Post by lbarrett »

PragmaticPulp wrote: post #161
discordance wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't mind the idea of take home exercises as long as I have an actual chance of getting in. If i'm really serious about joining a company and the many months/years to come with them, I can probably spare a day to show it.

Agreed. It's always surprising to read people complaining about spending even 8 hours on a take-home problem in the comfort of their home, with no one looking over their shoulder, finished at their leisure. Meanwhile, anyone serious about applying to the same company wouldn't hesitate to take PTO and leave work to go on-site for a similar amount of time for an interview.

If you do the take-home problem, do you get to skip the interview? My understanding was that it might, at most, replace a 1-hour whiteboarding interview. The one time I did a take-home problem for an interview, I spent a whole weekend day on it (which felt hard, given that I was making my wife watch our child all day), and then I still had to spend a whole day on in-person interviews.

And then they didn't even ask me any questions about my take-home solution--it was just ignored. It felt like a pure waste. I'd much rather do whiteboarding.

Re: Hiring Without Whiteboards

#180

Post by TooCleverByHalf »

PragmaticPulp wrote: post #159
marcinzm wrote: post #46

The advantage of leetcode is that you study once and then it applies for every job you interview for. Like democracy it's a horrible system except for all the others. Take home project? There goes 4-12 hours per company that gives you one and sometimes more. Companies have no incentive to cut it down or not give it to even marginal candidates so you'll get a lot more of them than full in-person interviews. Pair progr…

In the past we had some candidates complain about take-home problems. The primary complaint was that candidates weren't interested in dedicating 4-5 hours of their own time unless they felt that someone from the company was putting in an equal amount of their own time. Some candidates also had suspicions that we were trying to use them for free labor (Not true, we used the same toy problem for every candidate). One c…

> One candidate even thought they should be able to bill us for their time spent applying (We passed)

Ironically, you passed on the smartest applicant of the bunch.

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